Because we thought post-industrial banality was cool, now we’re way too cool for Sheffield. Read On..

Who needs Sheffield when you’ve got Saatchi & Saatchi. Charles loved the way we wanted to gentrify some naff old Cooling Towers in the name of art; he thought that it would make the perfect ‘cum shot’ for his high profile rape of working class culture. But alas our ideas proved too visionary for you South Yorkshire folk and we were forced to find a creative outlet at the top the dizzying artistic heights of the advertising world.

The so called ‘creative industries’ represent the vanguard of global consumer capitalism. Advertising, movies, pop tunes, i Phones, virals, pod casts, CGI, computer games consoles, HD ready tele-fucking-vision; all of this ‘creativity’ amounts to nothing more than a clever distraction; a sleight of hand to keep people passive while their lives are stolen from them in the name of profit and progress.

The cleverest trick of all is that those who work in the creative industries actually believe that they’re doing humanity a service, they’re like the Victorian gentleman who beats his wife and children ‘for their own good’ – talk about the blind leading the blind.

The most ironic moment for post-modern culture came with the release of the 1999 science fiction film, The Matrix.

The story was an allegory, a wonderful metaphor for consumer society, with a message that said ‘you’re being robbed of your lives by a mega-machine that offers entertainment in place of existence’.

Movie goers nodded in agreement and then paid the producers $460 million worldwide for the ‘pleasure’ of being entertained – you really couldn’t make this shit up! Post-modern, consumerist ‘Art’ fairs no better; where the avant-garde once sought to awaken society with satire and debate, Art Inc. seeks to placate the hoi polloi with gimmicks and fads.

The Saatchi Gallery even runs an X-Factor type competition on their website. Which is exactly why Charles Saatchi must die if British Art is ever to be reborn – and we’re not talking metaphorically here, Valerie Solanas (she tried to kill Andy Warhol and wrote SCUM Manifesto) knew how to treat art vampires.

Maybe we could have a live television phone-in to help us decide who to shoot first (we will produce the adverts). Choose from Charles Saatchi, Simon Cowell or the whole of the Middle Class?

Phone lines now open

Charles Saatchi- 0839 ur32daurt 1

Simon Cowell- 0840 ur32daurt 2

Middle Class- 0841 ur32daurt 3

cost from a land line 97 pence a second (free to the gullible) calls may cost more on a mobile depending on postcode (i.e. S7 you cannot vote). This is open only to the Working Class. Phone now and you might win the opportunity to kill the first 100 Middle Class..Phone lines operated by The(South Yorkshire branch of) The Angry Brigade.

All cashed raised goes to arms, phone today for a better future.

Forty years ago, as they blew up a trendy Biba fashion boutique,

The Angry Brigade said…

`If you’re not busy being born you’re busy buying’.

All the sales girls in the flash boutiques are made to dress the same and have the same make-up, representing the 1940’s. In fashion as in everything else, capitalism can only go backwards — they’ve nowhere to go — they’re dead.

The future is ours.

Life is so boring there is nothing to do except spend all our wages on the latest skirt or shirt.

Brothers and Sisters, what are your real desires?

Sit in the drug store, look distant, empty, bored, drinking some tasteless coffee? Or perhaps BLOW IT UP OR BURN IT DOWN. The only thing you can do with modern slave-houses — called boutiques — IS WRECK THEM. You can’t reform profit capitalism and inhumanity. Just kick it till it breaks.

But our righteous anger has long been placated by well marketed promises of ‘ethical consumerism’ and our cowardly youth are far more interested in celebrity than society. C’mon kids,

let’s visit the ’TaKe Modern’ (itself an institute seeped in the blood of slavery) and blow it up or burn it down or kick it till it breaks – or are you, indeed, already fucking dead.

Of course we had to find a town like Sheffield to further our artistic careers because our own Middle Class culture is completely void of creativity. ‘The Full Monty’, ‘Brassed Off’, ‘Billy Elliot’, ‘Coronation Street’; we luuuuuurv Working Class culture, just as long as we can recreate reality with sanitised stereotypes that don’t threaten the status quo.

If we didn’t land the Saatchi job we were going to move to a Brazilian favela to get a feel for some real poverty.

Just because our Middle Class brethren created the slums of the world doesn’t mean that we can’t fleece the poor just that little bit more; ‘City of God’ grossed $27 million worldwide, thank you very much. Like a rabbit on Viagra we just keep fucking you over and over and over and…

Middle class life may be as dull as dishwater, but that isn’t going to stop us pushing it as the ‘normal’ way for humans to live – we’re all Middle Class now, just ask John Prescott.

The New-World-Order is an all embracing mono culture that will eventually smother any form of individuality or cultural diversity.

Where once creativity thrived; bureaucracy, bullying and banality shall reign supreme. Our class aims to keep humanity in a permanent state of boredom. Bored people keep buying things in the hope that, this time, they will finally feel satisfied. And low-paid bored people keep borrowing money so that they can have a new house/car/gadget/designer-label/TV/holiday/3-piece-suite/boob-job/narcotic/university-degree/eco-whatever (delete as appropriate).

This, of course, is essential to the bourgeoisie because debt creates wealth – every time somebody takes something on credit new ‘money’ is generated by the banks. We know it sounds ludicrous, but this is the nature of capitalist ‘growth.’

The foolish mantra of ‘unlimited growth’ in a ‘finite world’ is not only utopian, it is deadly.Perpetual growth in the natural world is cancer; perpetual growth in economics is still cancer.

A glut of wealth in the hands of the rich acts like a tumour on society, it absorbs the resources of an otherwise healthy body and creates sickness throughout. The only cure is to kill the tumour – cut it out, irradiate it, give it chemo – let the Middle Class die so that humanity may live! (Make The Middle Class History)

No matter where you are, whether your in suburban Nether Edge or the Kibera district of Nairobi (the world’s largest slum) you’ll be barraged with images devised by ad-men (like us) with the sole intention of selling you something you neither want or need (indeed, if you really needed something, then it wouldn’t have to be advertised would it?).

Trendy marketing agencies and slick TV production companies conspire to create a grossly distorted image of Middle Class Western lifestyles; we sell you the lie that we’re something that you should aspire to, that we’ve built an earthly paradise that is open to anyone – if you just work hard enough for it. Of course nobody lives like the people on TV. Why would you want to keep up with the Jones’s when everybody knows that Jonesy is a fucked up, over stressed, Prozac popping divorcee with a crippling mortgage and a heart condition.

We don’t feel too bad about using Sheffield the way we did, we’re natural born parasites and we were just doing our job. Besides, there are a lot of Middle Class people who are much, much worse than we are.It was successive Middle Class governments who demolished Sheffield’s industry in order to weaken Working Class solidarity.

The miners strike of 1984 gave the Middle Class an excuse to physically tear South Yorkshire’s communities apart – and to flood the already traumatised pit villages with cheap heroin.

We joke not, as we were busy patronising the Working Class they even told us this. Never! we thought. Of course we didn’t believe them at first (and who would?) so we asked about finding out if there was any truth in this, we were never going to offer any form of apology, just continued to treat them with patronising contempt.

We had the feeling they knew that we were doing this and we now realise the truth of their game, along with others we are in that little black book of theirs, along the with other Middle Class parasites to be dealt with come the moment of civil unrest (they seem to mean it when they say bring on peak oil). Another reason one of us moved to London, along with all the cash we made is now funding the travel around the world for one of us.

We talked a good green argument, but who gives a shit about the rape of mother earth, we hugged trees because it was radi-cool nothing else. It wasn’t us who decimated the local economies and destroyed every last shred of independence in working class areas –

But we’re exactly the sort of Middle Class tossers who have directly benefited from the second bourgeois revolution (otherwise known as ‘neoliberalism’, whatever you choose to call it there can be little doubt that the corporate/shareholder/middle class have been in active revolt against the rest of humanity for the last 30 years).

Although some of the peasantry may have a few more quid to rub together thanks to estate agents deviously inflating the price of housing stock, social mobility in Britain is a complete fucking myth.

The percentage of kids from poor families attending university today is as low as it was 50 years ago – even though they renamed the polytechnics (now Sheffield Hallam University and in the top ten of the richest ones in the UK) to try and make us Middle Class kids look brighter than we really are.

Meritocracy, stress inducing SAT;s and league tables have been introduced to try and make it look like any failure is the fault of the kids themselves, but middle class kids have the dice loaded well and truly in their favour - which makes it doubly sad when they have to leach off the working class to improve their CVs.

We’ve been trying to make something amazing happen in Sheffield, our beloved Cooling Towers for the last couple of years. But it’s not looking good for the towers, and it’s increasingly likely that the owners E-ON will demolish them. So before this happens, we want to give people a chance to celebrate them, as our city’s favourite landmarks.

COOLING TOWERS: A WANABEE’S DREAM!

NOW HANGING ON THE WALL, WASHING THE POTS, GATHERING DUST ON THE COLLECTABLE’S TAT SHELF.

We did it in usual tourist fashion: by opening a gift shop, we hyped it all up with our friends in the local and national press. On the first day the stupid formed a line, It was as if downtown Afghanistan or Iraq had come to Sheffield, had the proletariat realised they were under occupation of us - the Middle Class? Of course not, they had fallen for our lies along with the hype. We said this was a not for profit adventure, this was a lie of course. Though we did not make a profit (apart from something more to add to our CV) in this rush of mad consumerism of useless tat others did, but we know you will forgive us. Because you love us for our blatant exploitation of the stupid who lined up to buy this shit. For fucks sake. Are these Antony-Gormley-wannabes so talentless that they have to pretend that these stark, soulless relics of industrial inefficiency are ‘art’? Post modernism reeks of this bullshit; are Middle Class culture-vultures really stupid enough to mistake ‘sentimentality’ for ‘artistic sentiment’, or are they just a bunch of lazy fuckwits?

Summer in Sheffield is a washout. There is nothing for us to do. As all our Middle Class wannabes have gone home to Mommy and Daddy, others are busy doing their jobs as social workers, ensuring the continued upholding of a society we pretended to disagree with. Nothing. No festivals, boutiques or otherwise. No outdoor gigs. No parties. No opportunities to get off it.

Summer in Sheffield means classic car rallies, family fun days, kids eating ice cream and patting goats. Those things might pass as entertainment for the uneducated louts of Manor Top, but they’re not good enough for the enlightened Middle Class.

So we have to do something about it. This was the Summer of Discontent.

The aim was to produce a poster every week – or until we get bored. It would detail something to do for every weekend over the summer.

Something amazing for every Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

The aim was to link up all the independent, amazing things that were going to happen: gigs, nights, and clubs. Tell people about it. But more than this, we wanted to create something bigger.

We wanted people to put on special events for the summer, for the Summer of Discontent. Factory tours, painting jams, acoustic gigs, guerilla masturbation sessions – truly wevolutionary and wadical stuff like this that appeals to at least half a dozen people in Sheffield. And, of course, lots and lots of parties for hedonistic parasites who want to look ‘alternative’ to get girlfriends.

We wanted to create a feeling, an anti-festival, something that only exists in our heads. We wanted to be starting something that we have absolutely no intention of finishing. It was only one of us others was in New York, at home with Mommy and Daddy.

So we needed your help. We needed you to get involved.

We asked you to let us know what you were doing then we put it on the poster. Or, if you were not doing anything, then we asked you do something special.

We told you not to ask for permission from your mummy and daddy – and don’t let the hoodies intimidate you, they might think they’re big and clever, but they’ll never get a job in advertising – so there. Big or small, free or not, we said just do it

But don’t tell your probationer that ‘it was Go what made me do it!’, because our country has archaic conspiracy laws that could be used against us.

Sheffield isn’t about Hallam FM and ice cream vans, it’s actually a city of some 525,800 people, where there are four mature trees to every resident, Sheffield is the greenest city in England with 175 woodlands, 75 public parks. So we have window cleaners and hairdressers as well. Our city has the best independent, cutting edge culture in the world, honest.

So we needed to show it, LEISURE IS THE NEW WORK, the new form of social control. We needed to get our Sheffield out onto the streets. Do it ourselves, again.
Take the city back. Though we are told by official crime statistics show Sheffield is one of UK’s safest cities, though we would never go to areas such as the Manor - too many Working Class chavs for our liking, We lied about giving Power to the people.Giving peace a chance. Om mani padme hum. Hare Krishna. Up against the wall motherfuckers! (er, sorry Andy Brown, was that a bit too radical?) Nobody turned up for our radical knitting jam.

The working class in Sheffield are a bunch of philistines and fascists who hate everything they cannot comprehend. Are we despondent? Are we fuck!

Now it’s ‘Peace in the Park’ on the Ponderosa,

we will not see you there!

This year they have moved from their comfort zone of Endcliffe Park and in to the heart of a Working Class Community, being inspired by The March of The Middle Class (shit, we mean the community event named Sharrow Lantern Carnival).

Here we can show how us the Middle Class snort drugs, as the police leave us alone along with our drug dealer to deal in our local bohemian-pubs; to our hedonistic nights of drugged filled get-along-parties.

We know and realise, the working class aspire to be like us and understand that they will mimic our actions. We do not give a fuck, we can ask Mommy and Daddy to pay off the nasty drug dealer who is a blight on the working class community they live within and deal from. But we have all the privileges to get over our addiction, tough shit if you don’t, this being the prize for aspiring to be like us.

We talked about Sheffield as if we truly loved the City of Steel, and harped on about what made her special: the buildings, the people, the streets.

But we weren’t really interested. We have no time for shit-for-brains Yorkshire folk. Your city isn’t fresh or luxury or sexy, like London, where the truly beautiful people live.

We copy working class writing, publishing, and mimic your fanzines, posters, words, art projects and ideas. We try to make our CV’s look better, by stealing your talent. We work for Charles Saatchi.

We’ve worked with people like Urban Splash, the Designers Republic, Groundwork, and Levi’s. We contributed to the catalogue of the British Pavillion for the Venice Biennale for Architecture, 2006. They all paid us a nice sum of cash, we also worked with local artists. Some we paid, others we simply used or abused for our ends.. we make no apology to them.

That was Go, now we must GO.

We’re amongst the winners of Channel 4’s Big Art Project, hoping to turn some old Cooling Towers into new symbols for the city. We were based in Sheffield, but never liked it much – especially not those ugly fucking cooling towers.

If you like what we did, get in touch, we will add your feedback to our CV’s All your cities belong to us middle class parasites now.

We could GO into why we have left Sheffield, but fact is we earned enough for one of us to go travelling, meanwhile we took work in London, Leaving Andy Brown on his own in Sheffield.

Being the sad tossers we are, we simply could not face the demolition of our beloved cooling towers, our much loved book shop Rare & Racy was changing and zero seven four two had stoped attacking the middle class. Need we say more? Will we miss you? will we fuck now.

Our parents for teaching us and nurturing us, giving us far more opportunities than the scum of the Working Class; instilling in us over-confidence, arrogance and self- importance.. the ability to look down and talk down to people, for letting us be a contradiction, changing our minds. Yes, Mommy wanted us to be a banker but instead we now work in the advertising industry, selling you shit you do not need. We do not give a shit about climate change, for us this is another marketing opportunity, a chance to make more cash.

We will be mega rich when mommy and daddy are gone, and we will be long dead when the life of humans has gone into extinction. Gia will remain, as matriarchy replaces patriarchy in a post industrial society we still remain rich.

Thanks to all to the gullible readers of Go. We were really

RADI-COOL weren’t we?

pretentious/pretentious.txt · Last modified: 2008/08/02 16:34 by james